Machinery and methods employed in the manufacturing industry have been continuously shaped by a number of market and business forces. For example, many manufactured products today are relatively more complex than those in the past, as high technology electronics have proliferated and become integrated even into commonly used consumer goods. Flexibility is key to a manufacturer's survival, as smaller lot runs of products having different feature sets must be produced on the same production line. And while the functional capabilities and the number of offered features continually grows, miniaturization and portability are equally important market factors as well. Add to the mix the fact that price demands have forced a greater emphasis on manufacturing efficiency to the extent that processing station cycle time is often scrutinized to a fraction of a second.
To evolve in the face of these and other factors, manufacturers must continually strive to replace manual operations with highly-complex and processor-controlled automated systems. Factory reengineering efforts must be employed to perform inspections at the component level and to permit assembling components just-in-time, instead of batch processing the components as has been done in the past. To the extent possible, product design and process capability analyses must be directed toward building quality into the process, thereby reducing if not eliminating the amount of inspection activities.
Illustrative embodiments of the claimed invention are directed to the manufacture of an actuator assembly that operably supports a data transfer member adjacent a storage medium in a data storage device. The actuator assembly employs a cartridge bearing having a stationary shaft affixed to a base at one end and to a cover at the other end, the base and cover cooperatively forming an enclosure. An actuator body, sometimes referred to as an “e-block,” is affixed to an external mount of the cartridge bearing and is thereby journaled in rotation with respect to the storage medium. The rotary motion of the actuator permits selectively locating the data transfer member adjacent any of a plurality of different data storage locations across the storage medium.
Static bearing characteristics, such as stiffness, are determined according to some previously attempted solutions by first assembling the actuator assembly together. That is, the body is assembled to the cartridge bearing and the body/bearing subassembly is assembled to the enclosure in order to test the bearing. The assembly time alone, which can easily take fifteen minutes to complete manually, is the critical path by far when such solutions are employed to sample bearings. The disassembly time is a harsh penalty to pay on finding a nonconformance when such solutions are employed in product assembly. What the related art solutions are lacking is a way to test static characteristics of the bearing at the component level.